Read this, if you don't want AI to replace you
There’s a very strange pattern I’ve noticed among smart people — they have stopped reading. In today’s world, that's becoming a big risk.
I started asking people I met a simple question:
What’s the last book you read?
I mean, actually read start-to-finish. Not bought. Not sitting on your bedside table. The answers were revealing. People pause. They struggle. Some can’t remember. They ask if an audiobook counts. The most common answer is something practical, efficient — typically a non-fiction book, and they didn’t finish it.
These aren’t disengaged people — they’re smart, educated, successful. People who make decisions, lead teams, build things. The kind of people you would expect to be reading. And yet they're not.
Fiction? That’s rarer still — especially among men.
The Data
Rather than rely on my anecdotal evidence, I looked at the evidence. According to the Pew Research Center:
1 in 4 adults in the US did not read a single book last year.
women read more than men, and far more fiction
the share of adults reading novels, short stories, or poetry has declined significantly since the 1980's
Interestingly, there is a small group that still reads a lot.
Most people read very little, only 4-5 books per year.
This Wouldn’t Matter — Except It Now Does
For a long time, not reading was fine. If you were smart, curious, and busy, you could absorb what you needed from articles, podcasts, summaries, conversations, and LinkedIn posts ;) But something has changed.
We now live in a world where machines are rapidly becoming better than us at:
retrieving information
summarizing content
explaining technical concepts
even generating passable non-fiction
If knowledge was the game, we’re no longer the only serious players.
So the question becomes: what’s left for us to do?
The One Domain We’re Neglecting
The answer isn’t more information. It’s understanding people. Ambiguity. Emotion. Motivation. Ethics. Desire. The messy, human layers that don’t reduce to bullet points.
Here’s the problem: at exactly the moment when these capabilities matter more… we’re investing less time in the one activity that reliably builds them: reading fiction.
Why Fiction Still Matters
Fiction isn’t just entertainment. It’s a simulation engine for human experience. When you read a novel, it forces you to:
inhabit other minds
hold conflicting perspectives
experience consequences over time
confront situations without clean answers
You don’t just learn what happened. You understand why it felt the way it did.
No AI-generated summary can do this. No model can fully replicate it. Because fiction doesn’t optimize for efficiency. It's about narrative, and that's about meaning.
Audiobooks, Summaries, and the Illusion of Consumption
There’s nothing wrong with audiobooks. I’m actually a big fan. I particularly like the Amazon Whispersync technology where I can go from an audiobook to Kindle reading without losing my place.
But there's a risk that we let the audio wash over us. I tend to listen when I’m driving, or running. Which means I only have a certain percentage of my mind engaged with the book.
True reading is slow. It demands attention. Your brain is processing the narrative as you read. It’s precisely this pace and friction that does the work.
When everything else in life is optimized for speed, reading is one of the few activities that resists it.
A Quiet Skill Gap
We may be creating a subtle but important divide. Not between people who use AI and those who don’t. But between people who rely on fast, externalized knowledge and those who have built internal depth of understanding, about people, and I suspect, the world around them.
One is scalable. The other is hard to fake.
So I’ll ask again: What was the last book you actually read?
Not because reading is virtuous, but because it may be one of the few remaining ways to train the part of the mind that matters most, in a world of AI.
A Modest Proposal
If you haven’t read a novel in a while, try one. Not for productivity. Not for learning. Not for self-improvement. Just to spend time inside another mind.
If that feels like too much of a commitment, try a short story. They are faster, and give many of the same benefits.
In a world increasingly shaped by intelligent systems, that might be one of the most human — and valuable — things left to do.